Jeff’s Place

Last week Nokia started shipping the US version of the E71 SmartPhone, the version replacement for the E61i SmartPhone that I’ve been using for about a year. I had placed on order on Buy.com a couple weeks earlier and must have received a phone from one of their first shipments, it arrived on Monday.

My first impression: WOW, this thing is really a lot smaller and lighter than the E61i, and the mechanical design is awesome!

Nokia E71

According to Nokia’s spec sheets the E71 appears to be just a little bit smaller than the E61i, but those small differences are deceptive, this phone looks and feels about half the size. The screen is a little smaller, the keyboard is smaller (removing the space between keys and a couple keys on the bottom row), but neither seems to make much if any difference in the usability of the phone. This thing now fits comfortably in my pocket instead of making a big square bulge, and with the reduced weight it feels like it’s not even there. But don’t think this is some wimpy flimsy phone, it feels rock solid, with a metal back cover and upper/lower covers. The keys have just the right amount of resistance and solid feedback.

E71 Side View

Aside from the smaller size, the real win with this phone is that it is finally a Nokia 3G phone for the US GSM market in their business/enterprise line. The E61i was technically a 3G phone, but only for the frequencies used in Europe, so in the US it worked only with the Edge data service. The faster data service should make email, web browsing, and all the other data applications I use a much better experience. Even if everything else works exactly the same as the E61i the smaller size and faster data will be well worth the $420.

The E71, according to Nokia’s spec sheets, is just a bit smaller than the E61i (4.49 x 2.24 x 0.39 in for the E71 versus 4.61 x 2.76 x 0.55 in for the E61i, and 4.47 oz versus 5.29 oz). That’s an almost 20% weight reduction and almost a half-inch of width, which is pretty amazing given that they did this with only a relatively small reduction in the screen size, and the elimination of just two keys from the keyboard. The difference in thickness is really a bit more than the specs imply, as the E71 has a bit of a bump-out on the back where the camera and flash live, while the rest of the phone body is even thinner by about 3/32 in.

The smaller screen size might be a concern to some people, and frankly it was to me at first as well, but having now used the phone for a week I can’t say that I’ve noticed it being any different. The applications I use most (mail, google maps, and putty) all appear exactly the same, text is just as readable, and if anything I think the image is a bit more crisp on the E71 than on the earlier phones. For example, when pulling up the Google maps satellite image of my house I can clearly see the plants and my dog in the back yard.

E71 Rear View

The keyboard changes to squeeze out that half-inch of width amount to two things: removal of the space between keys (so the keys on the E71 are directly against each other, there is no inter-key spacing as there was on the E61i and E62) and removal of the right-shift and the dedicated control key. The left-shift key and function key no longer have to be held down while pressing the next key so you can press and release the shift key, the a letter key, to get the upper-case letter, which makes thumb-typing quite a bit easier. The control key is now shared with the ‘Chr’ key. Some of the symbols have been removed from the alpha keys but they are still available in the “Chr” menu.

Nokia E61i

The other keyboard change is to the four function keys on the left and right sides of the scroll key. There is no longer an “Own” key, which has been replaced with a Calendar key, the “Menu” key has changed to “Home”, and the positions of the keys has been juggled around. Three of the four keys are programmable for both short and long presses, while the “Home” key is not programmable and behaves pretty much the same as the Menu key used to except that now a single press of the Home key returns you to the active-idle screen. Holding down the “Home” key still brings up the task list.

The tighter keyboard takes a little getting used to since you have to be a little more precise with your thumbs to avoid hitting the wrong key but after some use it seems like my typing on the E71 is really no worse than on the older phones. I do miss some of the symbols, such as the parentheses which used to be above the S and D keys, but once you use a symbol in the Chr menu it the phone remembers your most recently used symbols and keeps them at the top so you can get to them quickly.

New User Interface

The Nokia E71 sports an updated user interface and a few notable added features which really improve it’s usability. The new UI changes the “Home” screen to add an option of showing new mail updates for two mailboxes instead of just one.

Home Screen

System Menu

The application shortcuts list got reduced from 7 to 6, presumably due to the smaller screen size, so I had to drop one of my most-used applications from the list, but it turns out that since there’s now a calendar key next to the scroll button I didn’t lose anything by removing the calendar from my application shortcuts.

The system menu look has also changed a bit, and adds a cool new feature which puts a small round image on each icon which contains an application that is currently running. As you can see in these screenshots I had the call log open, in the Installations list I had the Screenshot program open (obviously, that’s how I got the screenshots) and I also had Mail (in communications) and the Music Player (in Media) open.

Office Menu

Installations Menu

Nokia includes a few basic themes, but it’s really clear that I’ll need to go hunting for a better theme or create one of my own. The stock themes are OK but I’ve noticed a few cases where the contrast doesn’t work out well and it’s hard to see the pointer/cursor. More on this later hopefully.

Mail Applications

My most-used application on this (and any) phone other than the phone function is the email application. I use IMAP for my personal email account, and Nokia’s Mail for Exchange for an account on one of my customer’s networks. As you’ll know if you read my posting on the E61i I’ve had some issues with the IMAP client doing stupid things and I had high hopes for a better IMAP client in the E71. Well, both the IMAP and Exchange clients behave pretty much the same as with the E61i, which means they work most of the time but have some quirks which can be a little annoying.

The IMAP client still appears to not recover from connections which get lost while it’s in IDLE mode. I’ve only had a chance to do a little analysis but it appears that while my IMAP server sends heartbeats every couple minutes, the phone does not notice when these heartbeats stop. The result is a hung connection which sometimes can be manually killed with the “Disconnect” command in the mail client or by killing the active data connection (via long-press of the end-call key). I’ve not yet had the mail client lock up completely like it does on the E61i but I also have not used it enough to necessarily have encountered the case where it would lock up.

The Mail for Exchange (MFE) client appears to behave the same as on the earlier phones. There still is no progress indication so there is no way to tell if the client was able to contact the server, or whether there was just no change to the mailbox. There is no error indication when it is unable to contact the server. Since MFE seems to have no real benefits over IMAP for mail (unless you also want to sync your calendar and contacts, which I don’t) I’ll probably switch to using IMAP just to get some progress info from the client. Exchange 2003 does not support the IMAP IDLE command and the IMAP client seems to deal with that, I think Exchange 2007 is supposed to support IDLE. I’ve had issues with Exchange dropping idle IMAP connections far too often but that’s not the phone’s fault, it appears to be just a crap IMAP implementation from Microsoft but it’s tough to say for sure where the real problem is, it could be a combination of issues (including proxy servers, firewalls, etc.).

Mail Retrieval Settings

I have found a workaround for my biggest problem with the Nokia IMAP client. The IMAP client downloads the complete folder list each time it connects to the server. On a slow network this can take a really long time, sometimes it takes a couple minutes on an Edge network for me to get to the point where I can read my mail. I don’t subscribe the phone to any folders other than the Inbox so I don’t care if it has an updated folder list. I’ve said in the past this should be configurable or only downloaded when in the “subscriptions” settings menu. Almost accidentally I found that the phone can be configured with a bogus folder path, which causes it to try to list folders in a root that doesn’t exist, so only one IMAP LIST command is required to complete the folder-list operation.

IMAP4 Folder Path

There is a setting for “IMAP4 Folder Path” which defaults to “Unix path”. This default setting results in the phone sending IMAP “LIST” commands to walk the entire folder hierarchy one folder at a time, which can be a lot of LIST commands if you have a big folder tree as I do. I discovered that changing that setting to something that doesn’t exist, for example “None” works around this problem by making the phone list something that doesn’t exist so it gets back a response from the server which ends the series of LIST commands.

This simple change makes the IMAP client 1000% more usable, and while I contend this is a flaw in the Nokia IMAP implementation at least now I know how to deal with it.

IMAP4 Folder Path Fixed

The Nokia IMAP client still needs to do a much better job of dealing with connection problems, by checking for the server to be alive and recovering dead connections. It seems like it should be fairly easy for someone to dig into this and make the IMAP client more resilient. I’ll probably try to file a bug report on this stuff with Nokia again if I can gather enough supporting information. Anyone got a Wireshark port to Symbian?

Music Player

Music Player Home Screen

The new Music Player application along with the addition of a high-capacity micro-SD slot and a standard 2.5mm headphone socket make the E71 a viable replacement for your MP3 player.

I downloaded about 4GB of MP3 files onto the 8GB micro-SD card via a bluetooth connection to my Linux laptop, which took about 6 hours so if you care about transfer speed you might want to use the USB connection instead, I just let it run over night. Once the mp3 files are on the phone’s memory card you just have to start the Music Player application and pick “Refresh” from the options menu. It quickly scans for music files on the memory card and adds any new ones to it’s index. Surprisingly this went really quickly, taking maybe a minute or two to index the 888 files I had downloaded.

Music Player

Once the index is built you can play music by artist, title, genre etc. based on the data in the song tags. You can also build playlists, and presumably download playlists from a computer, although I haven’t taken the time to figure out the playlist format. It would probably be a lot easier to build complex playlists on a computer and download them so I’ll probably check into this soon. The music player also has all the typical features such as shuffle and repeat, and it even keeps track of recently-played tracks so even in shuffle mode you can go backwards through the tracks already played in the right order (some mp3 players don’t do this so going backwards is just as random as going forward in shuffle mode).

Music Player

Naturally the headphones which ship with the phone are pretty crappy so if you care about the sound of your music you’ll want to use some good headphones. Most good headphones use a 3.5mm plug so you’ll need an adapter. Luckily Shure recently released a great new product, the Music Phone Adapter, which for about $40 plugs into the 2.5mm socket on the phone and has a 3.5mm socket for your headphones to plug into. It also contains a microphone and a single button which allows you to make and receive calls using your headphones. The Nokia E71 works well with the Shure MPA-2B.

The sound quality from the E71 is pretty good, although at low volumes there is some noticeable audio hiss when I use my Shure E500 headphones, but that hiss is barely evident when using the stock cheap headphones. These Shure headphones have really good audio quality but at the cost of also accurately reproducing the amplifier noise and other flaws from the source. I’ve used them with several MP3 players and other devices and I always hear audio noise that is often not noticeable with cheap headphones. But, turn up the volume a little and the sound really pops, easily overcoming the low-level noise.

And More

This phone does a ton of other stuff, I’ve barely touched the tip of the iceberg in this review. There are features to play podcasts, upload camera images directly to web sites, etc. The QuickOffice application and the Adobe reader tools allow you to create, edit, and print documents. And tons more. As I have time explore some of these other features I’ll add updates to cover them.